Greg Koch doesn’t care if you don’t like Stone Brewing’s Co.’s beer. Case in point, the label on a bottle of Arrogant Bastard Ale:

This is an aggressive beer. You probably won’t like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth. We would suggest that you stick to safer and more familiar territory…

Koch, Stone’s CEO and cofounder, insists that when he wrote that caption back in 1997 when they first released the beer, it wasn’t a marketing gimmick. He really didn’t want people who prefer “fizzy yellow beer” to buy this hoppy, high-alcohol monster without fair warning. Of course, he did have some fun with it, reveling in the mocking tone of the Arrogant Bastard.

“That’s a tone of voice that I attribute to the beer and not to myself. Although maybe there is a little bit of me in there,” says Koch, who with partner Steve Wagner started in 1996 what would become one of the largest and most beloved craft breweries in the United States.

That little bit of arrogance — although you might swap that descriptor out with optimism, passion, or persistence — is in large part what has made Stone the giant success it is today.

Stone Brewing started early in the craft beer revolution, when the market had little interest in bitter, heavy brews, but Koch and Wagner had strong and unwavering opinions about good beer. When they decided to start their own brewery they knew they had to stick stubbornly to their ideals, and accept that some set of people would like it … or they wouldn’t.

But they did, and as Americans came around to more aggressive flavor profiles in their beers (with Stone and other small breweries leading the charge), the Southern California-based operation grew rapidly, averaging 50 percent annual growth and ranking consistently as one of the country’s fastest-growing companies and best-reviewed breweries.

In this interview you will learn:

- Why Greg has never had to ever pay for advertisement for Stone Brewing Co

- How to develop a cult following

- Creating something that people truly want

- What it means to follow your heart and create true art

- The Stone Brewing story, and how it all started

- Marketing copy 101

- & Much more!

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37,000 feet high in the air. Hurtling forward at hundreds of miles per hour.

This was it. This was the scene. This was where Chris Ducker sat when he wrote his resignation letter – a step that helped his career take off and reach new heights.

“I got my job because I ultimately become unemployable,” he says. His current job: CEO. But as he sat aboard that plane to Hong Kong in 2006, Chris wasn't the boss – he was being bossed around. He says that the head of the company he worked for was “such a pain-in-the-butt boss, just a micromanaging boss.”

Living in the Philippines, Chris worked for a Florida-based infomercial company. But his work earned the company half a million dollars per month in sales, which was far more than his salary. Throw that fact on top of the fraught feelings he bore towards his boss's management methods, and Chris was itching for something different.

So he crafted his resignation letter on an airplane flight to Hong Kong. When the plane landed, he sent the email, officially resigning. He didn't intend to return to the world of work as someone else's employee, so he entered entrepreneurship.

Having been involved in the Philippine call center market for several years, Chris decided that the niche could support a new company. He launched with seven staff and a lot of courage.

Eight years on, Chris still works as CEO for his Live2Sell group of companies. Composing the group is a call center, a business to help people find virtual staff, and a co-working space. Starting with seven staff, the group now boasts 270 employees.

To get there, Chris worked hard. He poured time and effort into his companies, striving to build them up to where they are today. And he pulled it off.

In this interview you will learn

- How to attain virtual freedom

- Chris's strategies and tactics on buying your time back as a business owner

- Productivity hacks

- How to outsource & train overseas staff

- Chris's best advice for entrepreneurs right now trying to grow their business

- The 3 lists you need to create to attain freedom

- & Much more!

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If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people!

This episode is proudly sponsored by DesignHill - The World's #1 Marketplace for Custom Designs. If you go to designhill.com/promo/foundrmag, foundr listeners will get $40 off the contest posting fee and $50 worth power upgrade of services for free.

There aren’t too many startups on the planet that regularly make millionaires of their community members. Or who have doubled user, traffic, and revenue numbers consistently for the better part of a decade.

The story of Envato going from a modest Flash design resource to a multi-site, multi-million dollar, online heavy-hitteris the essence of startup success. In fact, as a case study, it should probably be taught in business school. Except for the small fact that the journey of CEO and Cofounder Collis Ta’eed has been anything but textbook.

Since its inception in 2006, Envato has boomed. Actually, you would have to say it has BOOMED. One and a half million active buyers, eight thriving marketplaces, 250 employees and over $215 million paid out to authors to date — all born from an idea to start a business that could support the travel aspirations of Ta’eed and his wife Cyan.

“We had just got married and we had a lot of freelance clients. It was beginning to feel like a drag! Cyan said, ‘Let’s go traveling!’ I had always wanted to start a business and we had some ideas about how it would work, so we just thought, let’s go for it. Even though we had to keep freelancing for a long time to keep living as we built the company,” Ta’eed recalls.

Since Envato launched FlashDen, its first digital marketplace that sells content created with Adobe Flash, the company has grown to include eight online marketplaces. There’s a good chance you’ve heard of at least one of them. The Largest of the Marketplaces is ThemeForest, which sells website themes and plug-ins. ThemeForest, is to digital creatives what Home Depot is to DIYers, The Envato Market also includes GraphicRiver, CodeCanyon, VideoGive, PhotoDune, 3DOcean, AudioJungle and ActiveDen (formerly FlashDen), while the broader Envato group is also home to freelance hub Studio and learning platform, Tuts+. Phew.

In this interview you will learn:

- How Collis validates his business ideas for marketplaces and how he chooses the right ones to pursue amongst the hundreds

- How he has rapidly grown Envato

- Raising capital vs Boostrapping

- How he got his first 1000 customers

- Marketing tactics and strategies for growth

- What it takes to manage a large team and becoming a leader

I Need Your Help!

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This is a short episode of around 20 minutes. In this episode I answer your top 5 most popular questions.

As I'm hearing from so many of you in our community, I'm finding a lot of commanlities in the questions that I'm being asked. Since I'm on this journey with you as an entrepreneur working towards building a successful business, I thought it would be fun to share with you what I'm learning and how I can further help you tackle these common problems and mix things up from our regular schedule.

Please let me know if you would like me to do more of these kind of episodes by emailing me at nathan@foundrmag.com

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“What's the relationship-minded way that we can make cool stuff happen on the web?”

“How do we use all these digital tools to be human at a distance?”

“How do we make people feel like they're cared for and treated well, and how does that translate into revenue for companies?”

Chris Brogan has big questions. He also has answers for those questions – answers that inform his own business endeavors and the efforts of companies that he has consulted for. This isn't middle-tier dabbling. Brogan has worked with big names like Disney, Motorola, Coke, Pepsico, Microsoft, and Google. Yeah, he's a big deal.

But Brogan’s company, Human Business Works, doesn't just serve corporate juggernauts. It also helps small businesses and solo entrepreneurs act on a community-centered approach to boost business. His company offers publications, online courses, and in-person training. He doesn't just have answers. He has proven solutions that could work for you.

That's what has propelled Brogan to the top of the online blogging and entrepreneurial space. Besides working as CEO and president of Human Businesses Works, he publishes Owner magazine and delivers anticipated keynote speeches at conferences worldwide. With a massive following, Brogan has earned the respect and admiration of entrepreneurs everywhere.

In this interview you will learn:

- Content marketing and the future of blogging

- What it really means to develop deep relationships with your customers and how?

- What influences Chris's business decisions

- Community building 101

- How Chris has become an extremely influential marketer, blogger & entrepreneur online

I Need Your Help!

If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people!

Eight years ago, Charlie Hoehn had no job. He submitted application after application to no avail. Only two companies offered him employment. His choices? “Back-breaking labor and a pyramid scheme,” he says.

Today, Charlie turns down work. He is a speaker, an author, and a marketing strategist. His recently-released book is Play It Away: A Workaholic's Cure for Anxiety. At one point, the former unemployed man worked so much that it burned him out – but he triumphed over that, too, and wrote a book about curing stress. The turnaround is dramatic, and Charlie attributes his successful employment to his signature strategy: work for free.

He didn't figure it out immediately. Charlie graduated in Colorado State University's Class of 2008 and soon faced a job market mired in recession. Bleak. Job-seeking millennials know it well.

“I was just blasting out my resume to all these companies for jobs that I didn't really even want …because that's what everyone was doing,” Charlie says. “All my friends were doing that and that's what I was told would work.”

“We get caught into these dead-end careers, and once we start buying a bunch of stuff with the money that we've earned, we've built ourselves a golden cage … that's surrounded by nice furniture and all these nice things,” Charlie says. “And then after five or ten years we think, 'Well, I can never go back, you know, I can't give all this stuff up.'”

At that point, Charlie says, “you've built your own prison.”

He looks back to his days of blasting out job applications and sees a mistake. Life isn't a sprint, he says: it's a marathon. There's no need to rush for a mediocre position that doesn't interest you. He found this out firsthand – his work-for-free strategy required patience, but it took him from being an unemployed college grad to working for Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich. He later landed jobs with Tucker Max and Tim Ferriss.

In this interview you will learn:

- Tactics and strategies for curing stress and anxiety

- Why we work so hard and how to slow down

- Ways to connect with highly influential people

- What Charlie learnt from working with world re-knowned entrepreneurs like Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin & Ramit Sethi

- How to become a recession proof graduate

- What Charlie believes it takes to become a successful entrepreneur

- & Much more of course!

I Need Your Help!

If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people!

In 2003, Kevin and Julia were sat next to each other at the Santa Barbara wedding of mutual friends. They hit it off, and the rest, as they say, is history. In 2006, they celebrated their own wedding, and in 2008, they welcomed the first children.

You would be forgiven if you think this story sounds familiar, like the stuff Hollywood movies are made of. But rest assured: this story is anything but familiar.

Along the way, the duo also founded Eventbrite, a self service ticketing platform for event organizers valued at $1 billion as reported by The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones VentureSource.

But let's start at the beginning.

When Kevin and Julia first met, Kevin was a serial entrepreneur working on his second startup, the Silicon Valley-based money transfer company XOOM, which he had cofounded in 2001. Julia, meanwhile, was working in television development for FX Networks in Los Angeles.

Their chance encounter at the wedding of mutual friends brought them together, but for a few years at least, their respective careers kept them geographically apart, navigating the murky waters of a long-distance relationship.

Eventually, that had to change, so Julia decided to "make the leap and move to the Bay Area."

In this interview you will learn:

-Growth secrets to eventbrites success

-The birth of eventbrite

-Sticking points and how they leveraged them

-How to understand your DNA as a founder

-How and why you need to seek great advisors

-Building a great culture in your workplace

I Need Your Help!

If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people!

Forget social media. When it comes to marketing techniques, newer isn’t always better, according to marketing wunderkind Derek Halpern.

You just started your blog. And now you’re ready to set the fiber-optic cables on fire with your wisdom and start raking in sales. In doing so, most likely you’ll be staring into a blue glowing screen until the early hours, cobbling together posts that your growing list of readers will find both valuable and compelling.

Starting from scratch, how do you build an audience and debut a digital product? What’s more, how can you convince people to buy it? Among the several schools of thought, the predominant is you could just let the product to speak for itself, provided it’s good enough. Or, as some of the more savvy marketers have found, you could get just better at selling.

The soft sell is out, and according to expert marketer Derek Halpern from New York, the hard sell is back. In a world of new fandangled sales techniques and buzz jargon, Halpern demonstrates that an adherence to the time-honored traditional sales process with a psychological spin is enough to cut through the noise to reach the modern-day consumer.

There’s been a rise in the number of books on the forces affecting buyer behavior, including Adam Alter’s seminal Drunk Tank Pink. Yet the motivating factors behind buyer behavior still, for many, remains elusive. Why do some people buy and not others? What are the triggers that will get someone to purchase your product over someone else’s?

Derek Halpern is founder of Social Triggers, a blog and podcast about effective internet marketing strategy. There since 2011, he has provided information on marketing to 140,000 subscribers. What’s more, the Social Trigger’s podcast recently hit #1 in the business section on iTunes, beating the likes of the Harvard Business Review, and the Wall Street Journal.

In this interview you will learn:

- How to master sales

- Next level Conversion strategies

- Derek's amazing story

- Content strategies

- The buying process and the psychology behind it

- Creating sales funnels

I Need Your Help!

If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people!

Forget everything you know, and everything you think you know, about starting a startup.

If Andy Sheats' success with health.com.au tells us anything — and let's be clear, when you're bringing in $100 million in revenue within three years of launch, you're a success — it's that to be an entrepreneur, you need to think of yourself as everything but an entrepreneur.

Sure, an Internet search of the phrase "how to start a business" would tell you otherwise. But the numbers speak for themselves. Doing things the Andy Sheats way might just be the path to victory that every startup founder is looking to find. So just what is the Andy Sheats way?

In this interview you will learn:

- The secret to Andy's success with health.com.au

- How to evaluate your startup idea

- Achieving rapid growth on a mass scale

- How to handle growth (quality problem to have)

- The key questions you need to ask yourself when starting a business

- & Much more!

I Need Your Help!

If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people!

AJ Leon walks backs to his corner office on the 28th floor. He closes the door behind him and walks past his $8,200 mahogany desk to his window. He surveys the stark Manhattan skyline in the winter morning sunshine. The Chrysler building, the Empire State. Without warning, tears begin to drip down his cheeks. In his boss’s office, right next to his own, he’d just been offered a promotion. His six-figure salary would track up to seven-figures. All before his twenty-sixth birthday. It dawns on him that he has to do something radical: walk away.

Have you ever had the sensation of living someone else’s life, or that you didn’t choose the path you’re on? Most people experience this, including AJ Leon.

AJ Leon is no stranger to striding halls of financial power. “One thing led to another until I became a financial executive in New York,” AJ says. When he graduated college with a degree in finance and accounting, he took “the biggest offer at the largest firm that I could find. I really didn’t care what I would be doing for them or where I’d be.” In his mid-twenties, he’d ascended the corporate ladder until he boasted a corner office in Manhattan. AJ was making “an absurd amount of money, with big bonuses. I didn’t even work a ton of hours. I was kind of at the top.” Yet he was crestfallen. The problem, he confesses, was: “I hated my life. I was completely and utterly passionless about what I was doing and always had been.”

When he was presented with the dream promotion, he was working on Wall Street. It was December 31, 2007, the month that saw the beginning of the global financial crisis and US recession. AJ Leon was offered a job that promised a salary double his previous one. Imagine while the world begins to crumble, you are selected to be groomed to make partner in one of the most successful firms in New York city. “[My boss] said basically you’re going to make twice as much money as you do. You’re effectively going to be number three in the company.” AJ realized he was just offered something that he would never be able to walk away from. “I got truly depressed to the point where I was crying, alone, in my office.”

In this interview you will learn:

- AJ's inspiring story on what it means to give up societys perfect life that is mapped out for you

- How to become a corporate misfit

- The secret to creating a movement that people can really get behind

- What it takes to turn your idea into reality

- How to obtain Freedom

- What it truly means to do work that matters and change the world one step a time

- How to live a life of adventure and fun!

- & So much more!

I Need Your Help!

If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people!